I had planned on writing about Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way today, but I've not finished reading yet. You can head over to Beauty is a Sleeping Cat now to get Caroline's take on the book. I'm hoping to finish in the next couple of days, but I won't be able to write about it properly until the weekend, so I'll share a teaser with you instead today. Although there are frightening scenes in this book, occasionally, too there are moments of beauty.
"The field flowers were just appearing; light rains washed and washed again the pleasing fields. In those parts the farmers seemed to have decided that they might prepare to sow a harvest. The little villages seemed queerly optimistic; perhaps the human hearts were infected with whatever infects the very birds of Belgium. The sun lay along objects with indifferent and democratic grace, gun-barrel or ploughshare. The war was like a huge dream at the edge of this waking landscape, something far off and near that might ruin the lives of children and old alike, catastrophe to turn a soul to dry dust. It was change so big in the offing that there seemed as if nothing could be done except leave or continue. Even in Ypres it was said citizens were trying to persist, mourning every bomb that fell, every apple tree in every ruined garden, every brick of every finely constructed house, every speck of ash from the fires of habitual love. Nothing had changed just here where he found himself--utter change was just across the plains. Nothing had changed. But something had changed in Willie Dunne."
To have a war in one's backyard is unimaginable, yet so many people in Europe endured this and several times over. The countryside will not have emerged unscathed and neither will Willie Dunne, I suspect.